(January 2017)
I enjoyed this book. In places I enjoyed it
very much indeed. Please bear that in mind, as I’m going to spend most of what
follows talking about its many faults. Though to be honest, they’re all really manifestations
of one fault. It is all, appropriately enough, just a little too… a little too.
Let’s start with the style, which
explicitly apes the overwrought formality of many 18th century
novels. It’s something you definitely need to be in the mood for (it was only
at the third attempt that I made it beyond the first couple of pages), but then
that’s true of a lot of things. More specifically, as I’ve mentioned before,
writing in the style of a bygone age necessitates a tricky balance between being
recognizably of that style while avoiding the aspects which caused it to fall
out of fashion in the first place. It’s a little too faithful in the latter
regard: a little too arch; a little too florid; a little too fond of lengthy digressions
on metaphysics, social theory, and various characters’ fashion sense that break
the fourth wall and seem to interest the writer more than the reader.
Which brings us to the narration, and the
narrator themselves, who is a little too obviously unreliable. Mycroft Canner
is writing, seemingly under official injunction, what he describes as an ‘historical
record’ of a key week in the history of 25th century Earth. This
gives him licence to embark on an extended infodump-cum-worldbuilding spree,
which occupies essentially the entire book (this is the first half of a
duology). He describes a global society which, in the aftermath of a devastating
religious war, has remodeled itself along principles from the Enlightenment.
Humanity has further divided itself up into seven ‘hives’, each with its own
system of government: the mercantile Mitsubishis (painted with a little too
much similarity to 1980s ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria about Japanese economic
influence), the empathetic Cousins, the imperial Masons, you get the idea. Initially
it all seems a little too utopian, and wouldn’t you guess, the cracks very
quickly being to show. More transparently, Mycroft is a ‘servicer’: a criminal
conducting what we might generously call community service, but is more
realistically indentured slavery. The nature of his crime is withheld a little
too long, so by the time we get to the reveal we’ve already reconciled
ourselves to the fact it was either utterly trivial or gruesomely horrific.
Mycroft himself (whose name, like practically
everyone else’s, is a little too significant) is a polymath whose linguistic
and statistical skills ensure his presence is demanded in the courts of all the
world’s leaders, giving him firsthand view of world events unfolding that’s a
little too convenient as a narrative device. He’s also curiously underrealised,
a little too keen to hide himself (or be hidden) behind the cascade of archaic
and anachronistic verbiage. In combination with the cavalcade of other
characters, this makes it a little too hard to pin down the heart of the book.
Whose story is it? If the narrator is going to absent themselves, there are by
my count at least four other characters who could reasonably claim the role of principal.
To be fair, Mycroft does explicitly address this in one of his many, many asides
to the reader, but you can only hang a lampshade on so many things before it
all becomes a little too tiresome.
The most egregious of these asides, and
easily the biggest little too, involve, oddly enough, pronouns. As a
sociolinguist (or someone with serious pretentions in that direction, at
least), this makes my heart soar, but as a reader it very quickly came to make
my teeth grit. The book’s considerations of the semiotics of gender—its
presentation, performance, and coding—are perhaps necessarily provocative, but are also beaten into the ground way past the point of indulgence. The conceit is
that in the period in which Mycroft is writing, gendered pronouns are
considered taboo in the same way we might currently consider racial epithets, a
taboo which even extends to non-linguistic coding of gender: everyone is referred
to as ‘they’ and wears unisex clothing, at least in public.
So far so good, but in presenting this tale
in a deliberately anachronistic style, the narrator’s also (re)adopted ‘he’ and
‘she’, and assigns them to characters based on behavior rather than biology. The
first few times you encounter statements such as "Chagatai's silvered
stubble glistened as she smiled" it provokes mental double takes in
exactly the way you suspect it was supposed to. The reader is then faced with
either falling back into tradition and trying to work out who’s what based on
the hints they’re offered, or taking a more progressive position and just rolling
with it, while, of course noting how the incongruities still jump out enough to
make this problematization of their assumptions warranted in the first place.
Unfortunately, neither narrator nor author
can let it lie: the biological sex of every significant character who Mycroft
chooses to reverse-code (for want of a better phrase) gets explicitly defined in
one of those self-satisfied asides, frequently mere paragraphs after their
introduction. It’s almost like they’re trying for the thing where a tired gag
is repeated over and over until the sheer repetition makes it funny once more,
but with interest instead of humour. It doesn’t work, and more damagingly it has
the effect of reducing a genuinely worthwhile conversation to little more than
a mildly puerile “guess the sex” parlour game. Pin the Tail on the Dong, if you
like, only your hosts nags you to play even if you hadn’t wanted too, and then after
every round crows about how he turned the picture upside down while you were
blindfolded, you credulous fool.
This effect is exacerbated by the plot,
which is a little too absent. The story revolves around the theft of a who’s who
list (which, for reasons that are never convincingly established, is a Big Deal),
a related investigation of the bash’ (kinship group) who control the ‘car’ transport
network upon which the global economy depends, and a miracle child who may or
may not be the messiah. There’s a lot going on, when looked at point by point, but
in amongst all the worldbuilding and philosophy there’s precious little action of
significance; it’s only in the final 30 pages that anything like tension
occurs, that you start to actually care what happens to any of these many
people. I’d suggest that the preceding 400 pages are a lot to expect people to
get through before the story starts in earnest; in media res it is not.
So, this is a frequently irritating book
that fails to live up to the promise of its pretentions. But if you’re going to
fail, you may as well fail spectacularly, you may as well fail while promising
something big. For all that Too Like the
Lightning is often deeply, deeply silly, it’s also extremely erudite; there’s
a lot of good stuff to get your teeth into, should you feel so inclined. It’s reminiscent
of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, not just in the proximity of their
inspirational eras, but also in the awkwardly abundant proliferation of ideas.
To give just one, incredibly minor example: The Enlightenment gave birth (ere it lightened?) to the
Industrial Revolution, of which railways were a key product and cause, spurring
both greater interconnectedness and, paradoxically, greater division. Through
enabling the linkages between manufacturers and their markets, they drove
further specialisation and stratification of not just the production line, but
the manufacturing process, and society itself, while also enriching and
empowering the tycoons who controlled them. (Tycoon, of course, is originally a
loanword from Japanese. One of the main characters is nicknamed Tai-kun by his
Japanese father figure. I refer you to the previous point about significant
names.) The ‘cars’ controlled by the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ are a clear
analogue to this, in both their wider societal effects and the power politics
they engender. The book is full to bursting with intriguing avenues like this,
and, less happily, burst it often does.
I can very easily believe that every one of
the effects I’ve groused about here was entirely deliberate; Palmer is clearly smart enough to have made her authorial decisions with proper cognizance of their likely effects. The constant
harping on biological gender, for example, could very well be depressingly familiar
to non-binary individuals making their way in the real world. I'm not sure the best way to highlight that is by perpetuating it, however. What the writer intends and what the reader
takes away are often very different things; in isolation, any one of these issues
would have been fine, but the cumulative effect is of an intellectual strobe
light: fun to play with, but unconducive to sustained focus—it distracts as
much as it illuminates. It’s all just a little too much, and yet, somehow, not
quite enough.
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “It lightens.”
No comments:
Post a Comment